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LA Schools Seeking Refund Over Botched iPad Plan
SternisheFan sends news that Los Angeles Unified School District is asking Apple for a refund of the district's effort to equip students with iPads. The project was budgeted at around $1.3 billion to equip its 650,000 students, though only about 120,000 iPads have been purchased so far. After the program went bad, the FBI launched an investigation into their procurement practices. The iPads weren't standalone education devices — they were supposed to work in conjunction with another device carrying curriculum from a company named Pearson. But the district now says the combined tech didn't meet their needs, and they want their money back. Lawyers for the local Board of Education are looking into litigation options. They've also notified Apple and Pearson they won't pay for any new products or services.
This is common in education. You rarely see any kind of pilot project or scientifically valid feasibility work. Education as a field is mostly a philosophy-based practice and is only now starting to dabble in evidence-based decision making.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
This school district was sold swamp land in Nevada... Anyone who works in the education IT industry (I do: And part of that is supporting iPad deployments in education every day) knew there was no way in hell this was going to work. Apple has done a terrible, awful, horrible job of enabling iPads to work in an education environment. They are a complete nightmare to configure, deploy and maintain. If you are going to put these things in a school, just use them for internet browsing and use real computers for everything else. It isn't that they are bad devices for individual users, it's just that the integrate horribly with existing networks. One of the most difficult things is simply accessing data on the network / computer accounts. For example, Apple *still* doesn't support users logging in to their network directories (other than using the incredibly-confusing-for-the-ipad-users and also incredibly buggy WEBDAV functions) and simply opening and saving files to those locations. Upshot? Pages doesn't get used, Keynote doesn't get used... Blah blah blah. It's just a nightmare. Great, wonderful, single-user devices. Horrible, awful devices in terms of multiple-users and network integration.